Tara, writer of this guest post today, is a blogger I met through the Spring Chicken Tribe, a group at the SITS Girls blog support site. The Spring Chickens are primarily a group of moms with kids who have special needs. Are you a mom who has kids with specials needs? Or a mom who is personally affected by life’s challenges? (I guess that’s where I fit in!) Come on over to the Spring Chicken Tribe, and join us!

In the meantime, enjoy Tara’s post: The Life of Halloween: Coming Full Circle

I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve never been crazy about Halloween. Well, maybe when I was a kid and at the age when trick-or-treating was still cool. But that was many years ago. However, now that I’m a mom, I’ve been thinking more and more about this holiday and it’s slowly reeling me back in. My thoughts have included the “life of Halloween” and the realization of how the activities and feelings associated with this holiday have changed so much over the years.

Halloween as a kid is such a magical time. A time full of parties, candy, and dressing up as our favorite characters! There’s nothing more fun than the thought of “What am I going to be this year?” Walking through the stores, looking at all the costumes and accessories, and knowing that you can be whatever you want to be on this one day! Shelves surround you, full of glitter, wigs, make-up, fake blood, fake teeth, masks, and everything else imaginable. Then, a couple aisles over, there’s all the candy. With that sight comes the excitement of trick-or-treating and the prospect of having mounds and mounds of candy to last for months! Oh, and don’t forget, carving pumpkins!

Then we grow older and trick-or-treating is no longer cool, but there comes a whole new excitement with this holiday. Parties! I’m not quite sure at what age I stopped trick-or-treating, but I’m sure it was a sad time. Come on, even adults like candy! But I remember going to my first Halloween party. It was in a dark garage. We played a game where we were blind folded and stuck our hand in a bowl of gooey something that ended up being slimy spaghetti noodles. Halloween music played and we had fun just talking and socializing. We also enjoyed the wonderful activity we liked to call “toilet papering.” Now, apparently not everyone experiences this, as my husband never did. We snuck out in the dark of night to fill people’s trees with toilet paper. Oh, the memories.

Then we grow even older and graduate high school, some going off to college. Here comes a brand new meaning to Halloween – parties…of a different kind. You may also get together with friends to go to a haunted trail, haunted house, etc.

After college Halloween may bring yet another set of activities. You may purchase candy to pass out to trick-or-treating kids. Or you may attend yet another kind of Halloween party, a work party. My workplace would usually have a carry-in and do some Halloween activities that included passing out candy. Yes, candy! A little bit of the fun comes back

Now I’m a mother and, like I said at the beginning, I sit here thinking of all the things I can’t wait to do with Carter. Some of them we will do this year even though he’s still little, like dress him up in a costume. But next year will be like a new beginning to Halloween. The magic that I felt as a child will all come rushing back, in parent form. The aisles and aisles of costumes, glitter, wigs, and masks will, again, be a part of my life. We’ll go trick-or-treating and sit on the floor sorting through the mounds of candy when we get home. We’ll start new family traditions, like going to a pumpkin patch to pick out our pumpkins, carving the pumpkins together, and eventually we’ll have Halloween parties for Carter
and all of his friends.

I feel like Halloween has come full circle, at least for me. Your journey through the life of Halloween may have not been the same as mine. Of course, we all experience different things as children and adults, and have different interests and traditions when it comes to any holiday. But I hope all of you enjoy this time of year and take a minute to think about your journey through the life of Halloween. Has the magic it had in the past come back to you?

Written by Tara from Three P’s in a Pod
http://3psmama.blogspot.com